In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales the old man's blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, was anxious that they should live together, but it was otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and on his return to London he wrote, 'My home is very gaunt and lonesome; but such is my allotment henceforth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.'

Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereavement was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest against Governor Eyre's recall. 'Poor Eyre!' he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am heartily sorry for him, and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from £6000 a year into almost zero, and has a large family and needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.'

Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with the Ashburtons at Mentone, and on the 22nd of December he started thither with Professor Tyndall. He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals made some progress with his Reminiscences. He returned to London in March, and on the 4th of April 1867 he writes in his journal: 'Idle! Idle! My employments mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling on the days that culminated on the 21st of last year.' About this time his thoughts were directed to the estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became absolute owner at his wife's death. All her relations on the father's side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it ought not to lapse to his own family, he determined to leave it to the University of Edinburgh, 'the rents of it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious students there, under the title of "the John Welsh Bursaries." Her name he could not give, because she had taken his own. Therefore he gave her father's.'

On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: 'Finished off on Thursday last, at three p.m. 20th of June, my poor bequest of Craigenputtock to Edinburgh University for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and Froude as witnesses; the good Professor Masson, who had taken endless pains, alike friendly and wise, being at the very last objected to in the character of "witness," as "a party interested," said the Edinburgh lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance; so I think did Masson secretly. He read us the deed with sonorous emphasis, bringing every word and note of it home to us. Then I signed; then they two—Masson witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply moved, as I well might be, but held my peace and shed no tears. Tears I think I have done with; never, except for moments together, have I wept for that catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of weeping would have been in other times a blessed relief.... This is my poor "Sweetheart Abbey," "Cor Dulce," or New Abbey, a sacred casket and tomb for the sweetest "heart" which, in this bad, bitter world, was all my own. Darling, darling! and in a little while we shall both be at rest, and the Great God will have done with us what was His will.'[39]

When the Tories were preparing to 'dish the Whigs' over the Reform Bill, Carlyle felt impelled to write a pamphlet, which he called Shooting Niagara, and After. It was his final utterance on British politics. Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of his works engrossed his attention for some time. He went annually to Scotland, and devoted a great deal of time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and annotating of his wife's letters.

Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster Deanery: 'The Queen,' Carlyle said, 'was really very gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose greatly in my esteem by everything that happened; did not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very mournful to me; the one point of real interest, a sombre thought: "Alas! how would it have cheered her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been there!"'

When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, he—in June 1871—brought to Mr Froude's house a large parcel of papers. 'He put it in my hands,' says Froude. 'He told me to take it simply and absolutely as my own, without reference to any other person or persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that it was an account of his wife's history, that it was incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion whether it ought to be published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish it, the whole, or part—or else destroy it all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to do.'[40]

Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own and his wife's private papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents. 'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, 'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here.

In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, then Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both.

Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter of three or four lines to the Times, which he explains to his brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through the Times a small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy, it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new war for the Turk against all mankind; and this letter hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest speculations on that side.'

Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the Bible, 'the significance of which' he found 'deep and wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.' The Bible and Shakespeare remained 'the best books' to him that were ever written.

The death of his brother John was a severe shock to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage poor students. 'These two brothers,' Froude remarks, 'born in a peasant's home in Annandale, owing little themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland's chief University what Scotland's peers and merchants, with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour, had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.'

In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; in January he was visibly sinking; and on the 5th of February 1881, he passed away in his eighty-fifth year. In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own people.

At his death Carlyle's fame was at its zenith. A revulsion of feeling was caused by the publication of Froude's Life of Carlyle and the Reminiscences. In regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was created by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by Froude. Was Froude justified in presenting to the public Carlyle in all grim realism? The answer to this depends upon one's notions of literary ethics. The view of the average biographer is that he must suppress faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is that the majority of biographies are simply expanded funeral sermons; instead of a life-like portrait we have a glorified mummy. Boswell's Johnson stands at the head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the conventional method, his book would long since have passed into obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froude has not overdone the sombre elements in Carlyle's life. Readers of Professor Masson's little book, which shows Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good reason to suspect that Froude has given too much emphasis to the Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle's life. In the main, however, Froude's conception of biography was more correct than that of his critics. In dealing with the reputation of a great man it is not enough to consider the feelings of contemporaries; regard should be had to the rights of posterity. In his usual forcible manner Johnson goes to the heart of this question when he says in the Rambler:—'If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyric and not to be known from one another, but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. If we have regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.' When Johnson's own biography came to be written, Boswell, in spite of the expostulation of friends, resolved to be guided closely by the literary ethics of his great hero. In reply to Hannah More who begged that he would mitigate some of the asperities of Johnson, Boswell said, 'he would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody.'

Some critics have insinuated that Froude took a curious kind of pleasure in smirching the idol. The insinuation is as unworthy as it is false. Froude had resolved to paint Carlyle as he was, warts and all, and all that can be said is that in his anxiety to avoid the charge of idealism he has given the warts undue prominence.